Systems Generalist, GPT Infrastructure

About OpenAI

OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably efficiently and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem.

About the Team

The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform.

We build the control planes APIs secure partner-side execution environments evaluation systems artifact pipelines and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems AI inference compilers and runtimes performance engineering security and external partnerships.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload target hardware profile compiler and runtime context and a trusted verifier the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate compile execute grade and improve candidate kernels runtime configurations and serving-stack changes.

You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable make performance results reproducible and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information.

This is a deeply cross-stack role combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and performance intuition. You will work closely with research inference engineering infrastructure security product and strategic partners to turn a powerful research workflow into a scalable product.

Key Responsibilities

• Design build and operate durable APIs and control-plane services for multi-hour or multi-day optimization campaigns including scheduling retries budgets checkpoints artifact lineage and observability.

• Build secure partner-side runner and grader software that can compile execute verify and benchmark candidate artifacts on third-party accelerator hardware.

• Integrate hardware profiles ISA and toolchain context compilers runtimes and inference-serving engines into a repeatable optimization workflow.

• Turn research prototypes into reliable product surfaces with clear contracts debuggable failure modes reproducible outputs and excellent developer ergonomics.

• Develop correctness and performance evaluation systems spanning latency throughput memory use utilization and cost efficiency.

• Build artifact provenance and qualification workflows that make optimized kernels binaries configurations and reports safe to review and deploy.

• Collaborate with Research Inference Engineering Infrastructure Security Product and Strategic Partnerships to deliver production-ready solutions.

• Drive technical architecture and execution across ambiguous cross-functional initiatives that connect OpenAI systems with partner environments.

Basic Qualifications

• 8 years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems infrastructure platforms or cloud services or equivalent depth of experience.

• Strong programming skills in one or more of C Python Go or Rust.

• Experience designing and operating highly available backend systems APIs job orchestration systems or durable workflows for production workloads.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems Linux networking storage containers and modern cloud architectures.

• Experience debugging complex systems and using measurement profiling and benchmarks to guide engineering decisions.

• Proven ability to lead complex technical initiatives as a senior individual contributor and work effectively across organizational boundaries.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with AI infrastructure inference-serving systems or large-scale machine learning systems.

• Experience with compilers runtimes kernel optimization or performance engineering; familiarity with technologies such as LLVM MLIR Triton CUDA or ROCm is a plus.

• Familiarity with GPUs accelerators hardware architecture ISA concepts or vendor toolchains.

• Experience with inference-serving frameworks or engines such as vLLM SGLang Triton Inference Server or similar systems.

• Experience building developer platforms external APIs remote execution systems or secure partner-facing infrastructure.

• Experience working with strategic cloud hardware or infrastructure partners.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core and to achieve our mission we must encompass and value the many different perspectives voices and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color national origin sex sexual orientation age veteran status disability genetic information or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information please see OpenAIs Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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